Design for Service

The Role of Designers

John Thackara on the role of designers, the problems of sustainability and the failings of Design education:

It’s rather obvious to me that design is one of a whole range of things that we have to be good at in order to meet the challenges of the age, which has probably always been true… The contribution of Design is to add something to the situation, but not to pretend to have all the answers.

Designers feel a weight of responsibility because they suffer from delusions of grandeur that they are personally responsible for the problem [of sustainability], which is simply not true… The social challenges are problems of systems and infrastructures and societies, and there are no simple, easy design steps to fix it, therefore one should not do the whole thing at once, but look for little things around the edges of these large stories that one can improve in a practical way.